Media coverage of the embattled employment minister, Michaelia Cash, hasn’t been as bad as last week, but all things are relative. Earlier this week her department released a transcript of a “doorstop” interview – a huddle with reporters.

The Q&A had been redacted to remove questions and answers – including several on the raid on the Australian Workers’ Union – which the department said didn’t relate to the senator’s portfolio of jobs and innovation. Strange, because those questions are evidently official business. Leigh Sales, presenter of 7.30, said the questions had been “censored”.

Cash’s office quickly blamed an “overzealous staffer” in the department and not her office for tampering with the record.

A political reporter for Guardian Australia, Paul Karp, whose questions had been censored, asked the department what it was thinking.

A long bureaucratic answer followed about how the public service had to be non-political and portfolio-specific and “free from political bias and political influence”. But buried at the end was an admission it might have gone a bit too far: “The assessment may have erred on the more conservative application of these guidelines.”

Leigh Sales (@leighsales)

Minister Cash's office has been in touch with @calbd to say this censored transcript was put out by an "overzealous staffer" in the department, not by them. pic.twitter.com/tpyLJZKvK3

Chris Lilley to make 10-part comedy series for Netflix

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The Netflix series, which is filmed and set on the Gold Coast, is the first for Lilley since 2014’s Jonah from Tonga was screened by the ABC and the BBC and came under fire for its portrayal of Tongan culture and Lilley’s use of “brown face”.

We can happily inform those who are nervous that there will be absolutely no black face or brown face in this series.

“Netflix have informed us that there are no plans for Chris to play characters of different races for this project,” a spokesman told Weekly Beast. “The project is in early stages and we will have more details to share soon.”

Man-spluttering

For International Women’s Day the ABC put women front and centre across television and radio for the second year running. It moved, for example, co-host Michael Rowland aside on News Breakfast, and Richard Glover on ABC Radio in Sydney. Across Triple J, Double J and TripleJ Unearthed there was a “Girls to the front” day with all female hosts and music.

“While women are equally represented across the ABC board and in our leadership positions, International Women’s Day affords us the opportunity to focus attention on the work still to be done,” the managing director, Michelle Guthrie, said.

The ABC also announced a new cadetship scheme encouraging women to enter the film and television industry with a 12-month Your Time cadetship supported by Screen Australia. Women are historically under-represented in the craft skills for film and TV.

But not everyone was on board. Behind the scenes at the ABC there were women who saw the move as tokenistic. “All it means is that women have to work harder and men get the day off,” one producer said.

One ABC host went public with his criticism. Tom Switzer, the presenter of Between the Lines on ABC Radio National, popped up on Melbourne commercial radio to slam the ABC initiative as divisive.

“I think it’s identity politics gone crazy,” Switzer told Neil Mitchell on 3AW. “I think that journalists, like all professionals, should be judged on merit or performance, not gender or race or culture. The reality is the ABC – TV, radio – is already dominated by many talented female presenters.

“So where’s the evidence of discrimination against women at the ABC? We’d be pretty crazy, frankly, if we don’t think this sort of identity politics won’t lead to a backlash. Just think of Trump in America.”

Bury the hatchet

It’s fair to say that when a journalist annoys a subject so badly they threaten to sue, the journalist is not likely to be invited into the inner circle. And so it was when freelancer Tom Ravlic wrote about One Nation’s election travails for the Saturday Paper last year, sparking a complaint from One Nation’s leader, Pauline Hanson, and a demand for $250,000 in damages.

The piece, “One Nation breaks electoral rules”, was pulled from the website and TSP ran a substantial correction:

“On April 29, the Saturday Paper published a story headed ‘One Nation breaks electoral rules’. In it, the paper drew inferences from documents on the public record about the legal obligations of an incorporated entity established by One Nation and concluded that it risked deregistration by the Electoral Commission of Queensland. The Saturday Paper accepts that these obligations have not yet transferred to the incorporated entity and as such did not open that corporation to deregistration. The Saturday Paper apologises.”

Ravlic told us the unlikely book offer came from the publisher Wilkinson Publishing rather than Hanson, and that as the book was a compilation of her speeches over 22 years he didn’t have to work on it with her at any point. They will, however, both be at the launch in Canberra later this month.

Palmer’s Carlton daft

The former politician Clive Palmer is using social media to build his popularity in the hopes of running for parliament again. He set up a Facebook group, “Palmy Army”, asking followers to “Bring your pies, bring your sausage rolls, bring your Yowies, bring your memes, but DO NOT bring the Greens.” But the group quickly went rogue and was taken over by extreme right-wing trolls.

A screenshot from Clive Palmer’s Facebook page. Photograph: Facebook

Now Palmer seems to have run foul of the liquor industry. Last week he uploaded a meme in the style of the famous Carlton Draught “Big Ad” parody campaign of 2005 – the one in which two huge choirs run at each other singing about a “big ad” to the tune of O Fortuna from Carmina Burana. Again he overstepped the mark. A spokesman for Carlton United Breweries says they’ve written to Palmer asking him to take it down.